Interview with Valerie Bunce, Part 3

This is the third part of my interview with Valerie Bunce. You can find the first part here and the second part here.

PART 3: Larger Issues

Core Ideas and Their Reception

Q: What are the ideas that you consider to be your best or that you are most proud of?

Bunce: I guess of all the things I'm most proud of the article “The Empire Strikes Back.” And I really like the book I did with Sharon because we dealt with an important issue and did extensive, unusual, exciting fieldwork.

Q: What do you think about the reception of your work? Are there any ideas that you think have been unfairly neglected or misinterpreted?

Bunce: I am not one to pay a lot of attention to the reception of my work or to worry about whether I was somehow insufficiently noticed or incorrectly interpreted. I did the work I did because I was drawn to political puzzles. That was what mattered to me - doing the best I could to answer some questions about politics.

Q: Have you changed your mind on any important issues over the course of your career?

Bunce: I think that I've become more negative about communism than I was and more sensitive to its many costs. It's not that I was unaware of the costs. But because I don't like capitalism, I was perhaps too soft on communism. The Cold War didn’t help. There was always some pressure hovering in the background to strike a balance. If one was bad, the other was good.

In addition, I have also gone back and forth on the idea of whether individuals matter in politics. I began my career arguing for the importance of individual leaders (though more for the idea of the succession process); I went through a heavily structural phase that left leaders and individuals out of the equation (evident in Subversive Institutions); and then back to a more agency-centered approach, as in the work on the color revolutions. I think the experiences with Trump in the U.S. - who got a lot of his way in his first term and with respect to the certification of the 2020 election and who is currently launching an extraordinary assault on democracy and U.S. national security - have made me think a lot more about the power of individuals in politics, especially in a context where information is bad and institutions are weak.

Research Process

Q: Turning to the research process itself, how do you formulate research questions? Where do you draw inspiration from?

Bunce: One way is I tend to reverse independent and dependent variables. For example, everybody talked about the outcome of leadership succession, but I treated it as a causal variable. That's a constant in my career. A second thing is that I'm very sensitive to real world, cross-national patterns. I am driven to lay them out and then figure out what is going on - not just across, but also within states. Why do waves of color revolutions pass over some countries and not others and in the latter cases produce regime change in some places and not others? Why did some states break up after communism and others did not, and why, in the former case, was the process violent versus peaceful? The puzzles that interest me come from the real world, not the literature.

Q: So, it's always comparison.

Bunce: I like comparing. I've tried to write on single cases and it is terribly difficult for me. I'm really stuck on comparison.

Q: Could you describe your general approach to methods? Your work has a diverse set including regressions, cascading comparisons, and interviews. How do you decide what methods to use?

Bunce: I think three things about methods. One thing is that the question you're asking dictates the method, not the opposite. Second, it enriches your intellectual life immeasurably if you experiment with different methodologies in your work. Don’t get stuck - it makes your thinking and writing sterile. Third, experience in one method shapes how you use other methods. For example, because I began my career as a quantitative analyst (but not only - I used case studies to thicken my arguments), I tend to be very sensitive to using precise concepts, constructing my arguments brick by brick, and introducing controls in my analyses.

Q: It is sort of the King, Keohane, and Verba approach – take the quantitative template and apply it to qualitative.

Bunce: Yeah, that's where I'm most comfortable - though I was a believer in that approach long before that book was written. Do New Leaders Make a Difference came out in 1981.

Q: Do you have any unusual work habits?

Bunce: I tend to be obsessive. I work a lot, write a lot, then take long breaks. I do not have a daily schedule for the most part. I carry around a small notebook where I jot down thoughts. Some of those thoughts eventually morph into books or articles.

Q: Are there any projects you wished you had done, but never got around to?

Bunce: There are several, but the one that sticks out to me is an experience I had early in the postcommunist transitions. I kept running into a lot of older Americans who were volunteering to help build capitalism in Eastern Europe. I was teaching a weekend course for Cornell and met a guy who had been part of this volunteer corps of capitalists that went to Eastern Europe. The organization that supported these efforts was based somewhere in one of the ritzier suburbs of New York. Anyway, I got really interested, and we hit it off very well, and he shared his diaries with me. They were mainly about his experiences in Romania in 1990, 91, 92. The diaries were fascinating. I kept thinking at the time: why would well-to-do capitalists volunteer to do this? It was a contradiction. They were believers in capitalism, but they were working for free. At the same time, I was fascinated by how they saw conditions in Eastern Europe. Was the real point of their efforts to feel better about capitalism, once they saw what state socialism had produced?

I began collecting a lot of material and making preliminary contacts. However, about that time, the chair of my department suddenly moved to central administration, becoming an associate provost, and the long-serving departmental assistant went with him. My colleagues (not all of them, to be sure!) pressed me to become chair. I thought it was important to help out, so I said yes. But I knew that doing that chairing meant I had to drop the project on capitalists. Too much travel and time were required.

Comparative Politics, Past and Future

Area Studies

Q: You have frequently argued for the importance of area studies, of knowing places, though you also view them as a summary for a constellation of characteristics (that is, replacing proper names with variables). How would you reconcile those two goals?

Bunce: It's one of those things where number one, with whom am I talking? Am I talking to someone that doesn't know anything and thinks it's okay nonetheless to hold forth (which sounds like virtually every member of Trump’ cabinet)? If so, then I embrace area studies with gusto. If I am talking to a person with deep expertise, I think about the importance of broadening their horizons, thinking bigger and more comparatively. The problem with area knowledge is that it isn't always useful. You never know over the course of your life, the courses you teach, the research you review, and the projects you work on what kinds of information will be useful. It is better to have more in case you might need it. As I mentioned earlier, who knew Dankwart Rustow would be useful to a specialist in communist politics? Similarly, who knew that my knowledge of dictatorships would help me understand contemporary U.S. and Hungarian politics?

I remember a line I used to use a lot. Knowing places and their histories is important - sometimes. You can be sure of that, but you cannot predict when it will be useful.

Q: Some have argued that the field of Eastern European/Russian/communist studies was isolated from the mainstream of comparative politics. In one article, you claimed that the field of communist studies had made the change to behavioralism but failed to make the leap to comparative politics. Why was that and was there a change after 1989?

Bunce: There was resistance to being comparativists, in part because so many people who worked on the communist region only did one case, but also because communism was understood by insiders and outsiders as unique. Yet another issue - doing our region was quite demanding in terms of gathering data, learning languages, figuring out ways to get to the region. What did comparativists know about those struggles? I remember, after the transitions began, teaching a course with a Latin Americanist. It dawned on me - you mean, when you move from one country to another, you don’t change languages? The Cold War also protected people. The region was important. But things changed after 1989 in ways that supported training in comparative politics.

Q: One way that Eastern European studies arguably changed after 1989 was that scholars of other regions began studying Eastern Europe. People like Kitschelt or Linz and Stepan. Was this overall a productive development or did you worry about carpetbagging?

Bunce: Yes, there was a certain amount of carpet-bagging, but what was very irritating: their sense of superiority. Western Europeanists were to the manner born. They thought that we should be grateful for their attention. Never mind that the transitions in the East made Western European politics more interesting. It was the hierarchy they imposed that was the most frustrating aspect of their sudden awakening to the fact that Europe extended much further eastward than they knew.

Q: In a review article in 2000, Charles King wrote that “It is difficult to think of a single book on communism that had a major impact outside the regional subfield.” Was he right? I’d argue that Subversive Institutions was one of the first. I think you have argued that the subfield used institutional analysis before the rest of the field.

Bunce: I think that was one that did break through. I just know that people said things to me, graduate students and professors in other fields in political science, but also in sociology and history: “Oh you're the one who wrote Subversive Institutions.” But I think what Charles was getting at is that there is a longstanding prejudice. People are creatures of habit, and academics are no exception. I'll give you an example of this at Cornell. Ever since I've been here, there has been a very heavy focus on the “developing world,” especially in the School of Agriculture and Life Sciences. How many times have I pointed out to the faculty there that their understanding of the developing world is anchored in Cold War geography? There are no developing countries - better put, low to medium income economies - in the former communist world? But Europe as a term was owned for a long time by Western Europe. How many times have I said - you know, the countries I work on are in Europe? Blank stares.

Q: What are some of the ideas or theories that Eastern Europeanists have contributed to comparative politics or political science? I am thinking of ideas that emerged from the study of Eastern Europe but were used in the study of other places.

Bunce: I think the issue of boundary flux. We were important in helping people think about nation, state, and relations between the two. When I tell people about the interwar period or about the endless boundary and regime shifts that make up the history of Ukraine, they are stunned.

I also think we contributed to discussions about the role of the military in politics, variations in types of authoritarian regimes, the role of literacy and urbanization in development, and preconditions for democracy. But perhaps our most important contribution: fleshing out the definition of and impact of civil society.

Q: This is just parenthetical. I agree with what you said, but your former advisor, Bob Putnam, who is the guru of civil society, doesn't mention the region or this literature in his work. I like Putnam’s work, but I always thought it was strange.

Bunce: I know. I think it's weird, but it also speaks to the blindness of Western Europeanists. They reminded me of Soviet specialists. Somehow, Eastern Europe was flyover country. Power plus Cold War geography get in the way of intellectual openness and inclusion. But one funny thing about Putnam. He had remarkable work on two-level games, but he did not notice the obvious example: a regional hierarchical system, the Soviet bloc, was the perfect example. “The Empire Strikes Back” was all about a two-level game.

There is a hierarchy in comparative politics. There always has been. The most important players, historically, have always been Western Europeanists, followed closely by Latin Americanists, and then then there's all the rest of the unwashed masses behind that. Some works disrupts the hierarchy, but for the most part it is as stubborn as most hierarchies.

Q: What should an area studies specialist in comparative politics know? If you were to design a curriculum for a specialist on Eastern Europe, what would it include? Languages, the arts, history, economics?

Bunce: It's changed over time because of the nature of graduate student funding. I was in graduate school for six years. People don't do that anymore. If they do, it means there's something wrong with them, not really wrong, but it means they're not getting their act together. I took four years of coursework. People don't do that anymore. And there are also many more opportunities for intensive language study that I didn't have and intensive stats study that I didn't have.

In terms of my graduate students, I have always been very big on them figuring out a lot of stuff themselves and then giving them a lot of feedback on it. I believe that you have to do the languages; you have to get to your place or places as soon as you can; and you have to experiment with your interests. Students today are quite narrow; that is costly, because the world and their interests will change. They won’t be ready or open. In addition, avoid chasing the newest thing. I cannot tell you how many job searches I have been on where I can eliminate a lot of files because they all sound the same.

Q: Would you send students to the History department or the Slavic Department to take classes there?

Bunce: At Cornell, they're only taking courses for a couple of years. I'd really like them to do history because to me that is an area that is almost guaranteed to be useful in the future.

Q: Recently Scott Gehlbach has written about how to encourage political scientists to interact with historians and members of other disciplines. How much were such interactions part of your career?

Bunce: Very important. At Northwestern. I was very close to the historian John Bushnell and I was also very close to a guy whom you might not have read named Mike Marrese, who was an economist who worked on Hungary and then later the Soviet Union. We taught a course on the great reforms that compared Nicholas I and Brezhnev, Alexander II and Gorbachev. It was a special experience. It opened up a world to me and because John worked on Soviet popular culture that also opened up a world to me because it wasn’t exactly the way I thought about politics and culture before that.

Q: Do you have any tips how to make those interactions work?

Bunce: I think you have to teach courses together. Either have a regular reading group or teach together, because otherwise it's just happenstance. It's not sustained. John was a brilliant guide to what I should read. When I went on phased retirement, I started going to history classes. One of my dear friends is a German historian. I went to her World War I class, and I was completely in love with it. You had to drag me out of there when each lecture was over. She was a very good teacher, too. And she had some passing interest in diplomatic history, in the Cold War, so we did have some kind of connection there. But I think you have to actively immerse yourself.

Q: Area studies is often associated with culture, which tends to be looked down upon in political science. Do you think that there is such a thing as political culture and that it matters for outcomes? Should it be studied more? Can you define the political culture of Eastern Europe or of individual countries in the region?

Bunce: I do believe there is something, but I feel like it's always a bit too squishy for me to get my hands on. Also, I like to be precise. I don't like talking in metaphors or around the edges of things. I also never wanted to learn that language because cultural studies has its own language. It just takes a long time to learn it and I wasn't willing to do that.

On the other hand, I think all of us who've done any fieldwork would agree that culture is pretty damned important. But for what, when, and in what way? These are hard questions to answer. When I teach, that's when my appreciation of culture comes out. I use it for the students. I help them get a sense of things by certain unexpected questions locals ask me, or unexpected answers they give me when I ask them questions. I remember being at a party in Hungary and telling a story about the Russian aristocrat who taught me Russian. I said in a stunned way - she told us how awful it was that the Bolsheviks walked through the palace in workmen boots. How ridiculous is that?”, I asked. Then I realized my audience didn’t get my point about class. They agreed with my Russian teacher. They hastened to inform me that, yes, the communists were death to culture.

Q: There has been a move recently to “decolonize” Eastern European studies in the sense of detaching it from a focus on Russia. What do you think of those efforts?

Bunce: It feels like they are reinventing the wheel without knowing it. I know - typical old fart comment. But honestly, I did write “The Empire Strikes Back”. Yes, it is true that the Soviet specialists were arrogant and aggrandizing, but that was hardly a state secret. Empire, moreover, figured prominently in how Eastern Europeans saw the Soviet bloc and in how people thought about how and why communism lost its legitimacy.

Evaluating Postcommunist Politics

Q: How do you think normatively about politics? Do any normative theories or theorists particularly drive your work or your evaluations of regimes?

Bunce: I don't think that way. I'm too middle range for that. I'm on the left; I support redistributive policies (especially given the growth of inequality); and I don't trust capitalists. I think capitalism without an enemy is really dangerous. It does what it wants. It lacks constraint.

Q: Branko Milanovic recently wrote a piece where he argued that the postcommunist transition has mostly had negative results for citizens of the region and Ghodsee and Orenstein wrote a book trying to substantiate this. To what extent do you think the transition has been a net positive or negative?

Bunce: It's too big a claim. If I look back on communist studies, we always had to make big claims because we didn't have much data. Everything was really aggregated. I think that people who joined the field after communism didn't have the same experience as the rest of us did. Communism was a pretty damn confining system and increasingly corrupt. The absence of freedom is soul-destroying. I guess I would say that the transition was oversold in terms of its payoffs. But that's a different way of thinking about it than what they're saying. I also think that the data on GNP during the communist period, for example, was of very poor quality. How many times did you go into a bathroom and you couldn't get out because the doors wouldn't work. There has always been a tendency for scholars to be drawn to shocking and/or counterintuitive arguments because that is a way to get attention.

Knowledge Accumulation

Q: If you look at where the field of comparative politics was when you started out and where we are now, what are the main things we have learned? Has there been progress? Are you optimistic about what we’ve learned?

Bunce. I am optimistic. I think that the rat choice influences have been for the most part useful. I prefer the ones that are more grounded in data, but in general I like the analytical rigor they require. I also think there is more interaction among regional specialists. One advantage (there had to be one, I guess) of the rise of Trump is that Americanists have discovered comparative politics - and comparativists have become much more interested in the U.S. In addition, I think that there is more of a balance between people interested in politics on the ground and politics at the pinnacles of power. It is also good that that departments are much less obsessed with having place coverage than having topical coverage.

Q: Are there any topics on which we have not made significant advances or have neglected?

Bunce: I think probably we're finally giving uncivil society the attention it deserves. We are also realizing that so many things that seem sudden - for example, illiberal politics, populist movements - have been long in the making. We were just not looking - or looking in the right places or in the right ways. Finally, we are starting to face the fact that progress is not guaranteed. In fact, to paraphrase Kamala Harris, we can go back. But there is a more general point. We need to stop ourselves from assuming that issues that appear to be settled will stay that way. There are no guarantees.

Impact

Q: A frequent criticism of political science is that it is too disconnected from the real world and has too little impact. Do you agree and if so, what should we do about it?

Bunce: It's interesting that you see IR people going back and forth between public service and the academy. You don't see that in comparative politics. The NSC, for example, usually has plenty of IR types and only a few comparativists. That is a mistake. Knowledge about places, key concepts and issues, and major findings in the comparative literature should inform U.S. foreign policy. When the Arab Spring took place in 2010-2011, there was virtually no one in the NSC who could speak about the key elements of what was happening - mass uprisings, authoritarian breakdown, violence in politics, democratic change or cross-national diffusion. Comparativists, moreover, are much less interested in grand theory - which has very little to say of use to policy-makers.

Q: How has your work been received by political and institutional actors? Have you had much contact with them?

Bunce: I was never very comfortable doing this kind of work. I gave many presentations at the State Department over the years on important issues of the moment, such as the war in Yugoslavia and the turn towards dictatorship in Russia. I gave periodic lectures at the CIA in Langley (during the Gorbachev period in particular). I was part of a working group at the State Department on the fall of communism and later transitions to democracy. And I taught a course for many years to analysts at the CIA (at its Kent School) on democracy and dictatorship. In all these cases, I felt that I had important information to share. I was also curious how they were thinking about these issues.

Q: Say more about the CIA piece of that. I'm curious. When did you do that? And what were the students like?

Bunce: I taught at the CIA (the research side) from about 2007-2014. The course, which involved such issues as defining and measuring democracy and dictatorship, analyzing transitions to and from them, was offered several times a year. It was an intensive course, lasting about 4 days). I lectured; we had discussions; and I worked with students individually on their research projects. The students were analysts working on many parts of the world. They typically did small projects (which they had proposed and which had been approved prior to the course), and my job was to help them make their projects more rigorous and to broaden their interests and the kinds of literature and evidence they used. They were good students, but much stronger in language and culture than in politics or economics. They were very weak in methodology. Their projects were, for the most part, extremely narrow. They needed a lot of help to become social scientists - which is what the agency wanted.

Colleagues, Collaborators, and Students

Q: At the start of your career, you worked at Northwestern. What was your experience like there and who were the colleagues you interacted with most closely?

Bunce: When I was there, Northwestern was a very tumultuous place and there was a lot of tension. A lot. We had department meetings every week, and we often spent our time arguing with one another. Northwestern had a group of people that had very strong feelings about how you were supposed to do social science and they were very unhappy if you did not fit into one of their boxes. You had to do quantitative analysis, large data sets. Every hiring decision was loaded because some of us wanted to diversify and some of us didn't, and the latter tended to be the tenured faculty. I allied with junior people against some of the senior faculty. I thought the department was too narrow, too unwelcoming to qualitative research traditions.

Q: Who were the people you got along with?

Bunce: Alex Hicks, Bruce Moon, Lee Anderson, Jenny Mansbridge and Meredith Woo-Cummings. I got along well with Ken Janda, Bob Lineberry and especially Dennis Chong, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Ted Gurr, and Phil Schrodt.

Q: In 1991, you moved to Cornell. What led you to that move?

Why did I move? There were several personal tragedies in the department that tore relationships apart. I was also tired of fighting with the Americanists and with the group that worshipped at the altar of quantitative and experimental methods. At the time, Cornell was very strong in all the things that were lacking at Northwestern: comparative politics, appreciation of area studies, and appreciation of different methodologies. I also knew Ithaca well because my former husband (who died while I was at Northwestern) had grown up there. I thought that the Government Department at Cornell was much better, and the guy I married felt the same way (he was in Political Science at Northwestern as well). Cornell was just a better fit for both of us, and I liked its culture a lot. While Northwestern ran like a modern industrial plant, Cornell was more informal and more old-fashioned. It was the old contrast between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft.

Q: Which colleagues at Cornell were most important for your career?

Bunce: Sid Tarrow, Vivienne Shue, Peter Katzenstein. After I moved here Matt Evangelista came. We had been in the Soviet Union together. I was very close to Jonas Pontusson who left. And more recently, Ken Roberts and Nic van de Walle, who unfortunately recently died.

Q: Can you speak about the challenges of being a woman in political science and Eastern European studies and how those changed over time?

Bunce: Well, it's a lot easier than it was. This is partly a question of numbers. When I interviewed at Northwestern, there were 35 men and no women (the same thing was true at two other schools at which I interviewed - Arizona State and Princeton). That year, two women were hired at Northwestern. One left before her tenure decision, because she had not published very much. That left me. Eventually, a group of women from across the University founded a women’s organization. It was small, but very active. We collected a lot of data (which the University did not want to give us) in connection with our concerns about under-representation and bias. I remember when the President of the University met with us. We agreed beforehand not to smile at him. He was a gruff, self-confident - I would even say pompous - economist who prided himself on dominating conversations. By the time he left the meeting and after we had presented our concerns about all the problems of being women faculty at Northwestern, he was sweating heavily and looked like he had been ambushed. I confess - we enjoyed that experience, even if we were hard placed to identify any victories that came from it.

The field of Soviet studies was very heavily male, partly because the Soviet Union was a superpower, and it was primarily men who did bombs and bullets in the academy. There were more women in Eastern European Studies. But having said that, in the mid-1970s and for many years thereafter, women were rarely more than five per cent of any given faculty group of political scientists. They were least in evidence in international relations and most in evidence in political theory.

I did not like being the exception, and I did not like carrying the burdens of being a role model. Was I as good as the boys? Did I represent women as well as I should? Was I sufficiently professional? These questions were always present, but unwelcome.

It has given me enormous pleasure to have taught so many female undergraduates over my four plus decades as a professor and to have worked with so many female graduate students. What I enjoy is how natural it feels now to see women in the academy and to see them operate without carrying unnecessary burdens of proof. But what pleases me most, perhaps, is that female academics are seen as being as good and as bad as male academics. There is nothing special about them.

Everything gets better when you have diversity of all kinds, because people of different backgrounds come at things from different angles. When I was at Northwestern, there was such a hierarchy - with respect to tenure and gender (never mind race, disability, etc.). When I gave a talk at Princeton in, likely, the early 1980s, all the assistant professors sat in the far reaches of the room and all the tenured professors sat at the grownups’ table.

Q: What is your approach to teaching graduate students? How would you change how we train graduate students if it was up to you?

Bunce: I help them become who they want to become. There are people who train graduate students by imagining little birds in a nest and your job is to drop the worms in their mouths. I see us all in the nest. I don't really see myself dropping pearls of wisdom. I like to help them build on who they already are, and I like to help them stick their necks out and try new things. I think my strength as graduate teacher is helping them turn ideas, hunches, interests into projects that they can carry out.

Q: How did the interest of undergraduate students in your courses change over time?

Bunce: Students were very interested in communist regimes and then in postcommunist regimes, though interest in the area declined by the early 2000s. Students are more directed, more practical, more interested in gaming the system and getting ahead now than they used to be. There is much more of a culture of pre-professionalism and less of a culture of intellectual curiosity. I changed as well. I used to like holding forth in large lecture courses, but then mid-career I needed more direct interactions with students to find out what interested them and what they were learning. I enjoyed both undergraduate and graduate teaching. The nice thing about undergraduate teaching is that you can set up a course to deal with “big,” interesting issues, whereas for graduate students there is always the responsibility of helping them work through the literature. On the other hand, debates in graduate courses can be extremely interesting.

Q: Has the interest in courses on Eastern European politics changed over time?

Bunce: With the exception of Introduction to Comparative Politics, I never taught the same course for more than four years. I kept inventing new courses. Otherwise, teaching would have bored me. I also avoided courses with geographical names in their titles. I taught comparative foreign policy, democracy promotion, introduction to international relations, political parties, the political economy of socialist regimes, presidential politics, transitions to democracy, transitions to dictatorship - you name it.

Conclusion

Q: What’s your advice to a young graduate student just starting out today who would like to have a career like yours?

Bunce: For starters, experiment more and plan less. Spend a lot of time making arguments and worry a lot about evidence. Shift your methods and shift the type of work you do. The academic life offers many opportunities to escape boredom - seize them! Recognize that graduate school is a time to find out who you are and what interests you. You will be following up these revelations and priorities for decades. Remember that teaching can be closely connected to research, if you make that your priority. Realize that you are lucky to be an academic - as my late colleague, Nic Van de Walle used to remind me. I still smile when I think about him saying that.